'If Dick Cheney had been obsessed by the poetry of John Ashbery'

From the Wallace Shawn interview by James Campbell in The Guardian :

In the mid-1980s, the sexual vaudeville of Shawn's early work gave way to political concerns, though the dramatic procedure was the same: just as the lust-filled reveries that occupy a person's private thoughts remain hidden from the world at large, so, in the second act of Shawn's playwriting career, the obscene oppression of the world's poor by rich and powerful nations is covered up by hypocrisy and, if necessary, military force. In The Fever, a 90-minute monologue delivered from a hotel room in a poverty-stricken country where political executions take place outside the window, the speaker strips away his delusions about life at home in a "beautiful city", where he has indulged a love of "humanity, beauty", only dimly aware, until now, that the luxury of his society is dependent on the deprivation of others. The play progresses to the only tenable position: guilt.

The original production of 1990 was described by Frank Rich, then the resident theatre critic of the New York Times, as "nothing if not a musty, radical chic stunt destined to be parodied". A revival in 2007 prompted the headline in the same paper, "The World's a Mess, and It's All Your Fault". Rich deployed the weapon that is used frequently in attacks on Shawn's plays, calling The Fever "an almost entirely humourless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members".

Shawn, who was educated at private schools before going to Harvard and Oxford, posits a defence based on sincerity. "Being in poor countries was something that changed me more than anything else." He wrote The Fever after visits to Central American states where ruthless dictatorships relied on backing from the US government. "It gave me an insight into the sickness of my own society." The epiphany gave him permission "to devote my life to being a writer". He has an engaging belief in the transforming power of literature. "To put it crudely, if Dick Cheney had been obsessed by the poetry of John Ashbery, there would be a lot of people alive today who are now dead."

In Hare's view, the reconstruction of Shawn as a political playwright happened as a result of his exposure to British theatre. "Wally came to Britain in the 1970s, and fell under the influence of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill and myself. Until then, the main tendency of his work had been surrealist."

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